The Red House (1947)

March 17, 1947

Horror for Adults

A.W.

Published: March 17, 1947

It's been a long time since the Hollywood artisans have turned out an adult horror number. "The Red House," which arrived at the Globe on Saturday, is just such an edifying offering, which should supply horror-hungry audiences with the chills of the month. For this tenebrous tale of an abandoned house set deep in a tangled and forbidding forest and its impact on the lives of a group of people living close by, is told intelligently and with mounting tension. If rationalization should reveal the house's secret long before the denouement, or much talk level rising gooseflesh now and again, the picture's cumulative effect still is as eerie as a well-spun ghost story.

A newcomer to this film genre, Delmer Daves, the director, who also wrote the screen play, has followed the blueprint laid down by George Agnew Chamberlain's novel. The somber and brooding mood is set as the camera, swinging over a sylvan scene, comes to rest on "Ox-head woods, which have the allure of a walled castle." When teen-aged Nath Storm comes to help with the chores on the adjacent Pete Morgan farm, both he and Meg, Pete's adopted daughter, are warned away from "Ox-head—the red house—and screams in the night" by the dour and suddenly aroused farmer. And it is through these naturally inquisitive youngsters that the mystery is slowly and suspensefully unfolded, a story involving a couple of fifteen-year-old murders and their dire hold on Pete Morgan, his spinster sister and Meg.

Edward G. Robinson is excellent as crippled Pete, whose mind is cracking under the thrall of the horrible secret of the red house, and Judith Anderson gives a taut performance as his sister who has silently shared his mental burden. They, as well as Lon McCallister, who is fine as the sensitive and courageous Nath, are supported by a pair of newcomers whose portrayals are seasoned far beyond their records. Include in this category Allene Roberts as Meg, the troubled daughter who is torn between her affection for her foster father and the strange "allure" of the red house, and Julie London, as Nath's girl friend, a curvaceous flirt who employs her obvious charms competently. Rory Calhoun, as a handsome and unlettered woodsman, and Ona Munson round out the uniformly good cast.

Delmer Daves' fluid direction and an appropriately macabre musical assist from Miklos Rozsa, has done nothing to detract from their characterizations.